Almost Green Prologue

Excerpt from Almost Green: How I Built an Eco-Shed, Ditched My SUV, Alienated the In-Laws, and Changed My Life Forever, James Glave (Greystone Books, 1998)

Prologue

My name is James, and I drive an SUV It is a golden-pearl Premium Edition Lexus RX-300, with all-leather interior, genuine walnut wood dash, seven-speaker Nakamichi sound system, seat heaters, moon roof, and sport racks. It is a high-riding icon of luxury, a mobile conspicuous-consumption statement, a prosperity public-address system—the sort of vehicle that valets named Chip park in front of five-star Indian fusion restaurants. Let me be clear, though, that the RX-300 is not an indication of my hard-won success as a writer. It’s a hand-me-down from my father-in-law, who offered it to my wife, Elle, and me as a gift just as our 1994 Volvo station wagon threatened to die with our two tired babies in the backseat some night on a lonely New Mexico byway well beyond the fringes of Sprint-Verizon’s digital safety net. Although we are extremely grateful for the gift, the Lexus was perhaps not our first choice for a
family four-door; it conveys a not-entirely-accurate message about who we are to those who don’t know us.

This became clear to me one day when I had lunch with my friend Dave, a former colleague whom I greatly admire. It had been a few years since we’d seen each other, and we were
sharing a laugh over a certain local restaurant critic whom we both felt could benefit from a little more journalistic backbone. Dave was describing his most recent sighting of the foodie scribe in question: “I’m sitting in this sidewalk café, right? And up pulls you-know-who in this total asshole Lexus SUV.”

Hilarious. For at least a few months after that day—at least when out of earshot of our small children—Elle and I referred to our pearl-white and gold-trimmed palace on wheels as “the
asshole.”

And please forgive me, Padre. Because even though you have that framed photo of George Bush, Sr., in your office, and even though you forward me e-mails asserting that global warming is a “swindle” and a “liberal conspiracy,” I do really love you, and I so appreciate your generosity. But the more I read up on the damage I am doing each time I motor through
another tank of regular unleaded, the more I can relate to Dave’s point of view and the less comfortable I am getting back behind the wheel. Because I am the one running a scam.

We have hung on to your wheels for reasons that contradict our gradually increasing consciousness and have everything to do with cash flow and guilt. We don’t want to offend you, and we don’t want to finance something else. I don’t think we can keep dancing like this forever, though. One day I’m going to have to break it to you, Padre, that I think your very generous gift is gradually torching the lot of us.

For now, assuming Pops doesn’t care either way, Elle and I are looking to downsize. With the kids now out of strollers and diapers, we’ve finally decommissioned our bulky toddler infrastructure. We are in the market for a small car. I’ve brought my preschool-age son, Duncan, and his five-year-old sister, Sabrina, into the loop, and they have already begun window- shopping with me as we tool around the twenty-five-square-mile island we call home, just off the sparkling West Coast city of Vancouver, B.C., Canada. One recent morning, on the way to the day care, my son asked me to explain the differences between our six-cylinder white elephant and the zippy little DaimlerChrysler Smart Car that had just passed us headed the other direction.

“Dad,” he asked, “why don’t we have a Smart Car?”

Let me briefly mention here that, like many young boys, my Duncan is infatuated with internal combustion. If it drives, digs, or flies with some flavor of refined petroleum, well, he’s
all over it.

“They’re fun, aren’t they?” I replied. “We don’t have one because they’re too small. There isn’t enough room inside one of them for our whole family.”

“Why not?” Sabrina chimed in.

“Well, there are four people in our family, and the Smart Car only fits two people. So we would have to take turns or sit on each other’s lap, and that wouldn’t work very well, would it?”

“Oh. ok.”

I could have left it there, but I didn’t. “It is possible to have a car that’s too big, though. Mummy and Daddy think this car is too big. That’s why we are hoping to trade it for a smaller one.”

“Why do we want a smaller one?” asked Sabrina. “Well, honey, you know how we always stop at the gas station to buy gasoline? This car is pretty heavy—it’s much heavier than it needs to be—and so it uses up more gas than a Smart Car. Gas is expensive, and it is also very bad for the Earth.”

“But Dad,” said Duncan, “why is gas bad for the Earth?”

Long pause here. Jesus, where do I begin?

“Hmmm. ok, when we burn gas it makes the car go, but it also makes the Earth get hotter. And we’re worried that if we burn too much gas, the Earth will get too hot, and it won’t be such a nice place to live when you two grow up.”

“So our car is too heavy for the Earth?”

“Yes, that’s right. We want to get a smaller car that all four of us can fit inside—one that uses less gas. One that’s nicer to the planet.”

“But not a Smart Car?” confirmed Duncan.

“Right. Not a Smart Car. There are lots of other kinds of smaller cars out there.”

“What kind of car do you want?” Sabrina queried.

“Well, Mummy and Daddy would really like to get a car called a Prius,” I said, offering to point out the next one we passed.

“A Prius? Why do we want that one?”

“Because it doesn’t use as much gas, so it’s nicer to the planet. And we can all fit inside one.”

“Why don’t we get one of those cars right now?”

“Um, they are expensive. They cost too much money for us, sweets. But we’ll figure it out. In the meantime, we are trying to use this car less. That’s why we walk to the village together
so much.”

“Oh,” replied Sabrina. “Oh, yeah.”

I grinned to myself. Duncan was hopelessly obsessed with fuel injectors and transmissions, but his older sister had just made the right connections in her head. She’s a smart cookie, this girl of mine. I was proud of her, and proud of myself for explaining that our present vehicle wasn’t so great but that answers were out there. I’d slipped in an age-appropriate explanation of climate change, without coloring in the whole grim picture.

Then Sabrina chimed in again with a pearl of wisdom that put all my eco-angst into perspective the way only a precocious five-year-old can.

“You know what, Dad?”

“Hmmm?”

“I have a vagina.”

“Yes . . . ?”

“But Duncan has a Prius!”

* * *

This is a book about the construction of a sustainably designed 280-square-foot writing studio—the building I have come to call my Eco-Shed. But it is also about the making of
an evolution. It is about my own ecological awakening and my personal struggle to reconcile an increasing awareness of a sick planet with a sprawling economic and political framework
more or less engineered to preserve the status quo. It is about the end of the world as we know it and the promise of a better one to replace it just in time. It is about the small trade-offs we
make in our heads every day between convenience and cost, entitlement and personal responsibility. It is about our natural instinct to flatten the protruding nail of personal sacrifice
with the always-handy hammers of convenience and denial. It is about genuinely wanting to leave a lighter footprint on the planet but running smack up against a series of obstacles—some practical and objective, others less so—and muddling through with as much humor and grace as possible.

This book is also about the transformation that has unexpectedly unspooled between my own two ears. Like me, you probably already know that global warming presents the single greatest threat to humanity in all of history and the most profound challenge we face as a civilization.

You probably also understand that the Big Melt is not just another “environmental problem” we need to worry about. Instead, it has emerged as the defining moral, ethical, and economic issue of our time.

But like me, you also live in the real world. A world in which you still have to get to work by 8:30. One in which the kids need to be at soccer practice and swimming lessons on Saturday.
One in which your benevolent father-in-law gives you an late-model import SUV for Christmas, then builds you a seventeen-thousand-dollar timber-framed double carport to park it in.

Transformational change is a messy, sometimes awkward business. As in Sabrina’s ultra-mega-blockbuster crayon collection, there are multiple shades of green. There’s what I
like to call “baseline” green, the color of normalized everyday activities and behaviors—curbside recycling, backyard composting, and USDA Certified Organic whatever. But travel a
little further along the continuum—move beyond these everyday norms and dabble with a slightly darker shade of green—and things start to get complicated. For example, it’s all well
and good to say “Enough, already, with all the air travel” but not so easy if your wife’s family and friends are scattered widely across the continent. It doesn’t take long to figure out why those who work the hardest to make the world a better place can easily find themselves not fitting into it very well. In this carbon-counting age, a thin line separates the leaders from the pariahs.

How does one embrace a greener life and keep everybody in it happy along the way? How do we gently redirect our dear Duncan, who equates petroleum with power and control and
liberty and adventure—feelings he is hardwired to covet—without turning him into a playground weirdo? How do I inspire my friends, family, and neighbors without making them
feel either inadequate or defensive? And more to the point, how do we get rid of our damn suv without throwing a metaphorical family piston rod, casting shards of broken steel through the
engine compartment of our reasonably well-running marriage? And speaking of marriage, how do I convince my wife to turn off the damn energy-sucking halogen lights that she insists on
leaving on over the kitchen stove? How, in other words, do we transform our lives without unraveling them?

We live in a tortured age—rife with elaborate guilt trips, look-the-other-way hypocrisy, newfangled codes of ecological conduct, and everyday paradoxes. I am at times my own worst
enemy. In summertime, I buy or pick organic, locally grown berries, then gleefully slather them with Cool Whip—likely one of the most processed foods available, if you could even call it a food. Every other week, I load boxes of tin cans, newspapers, and carefully rinsed plastic milk jugs into my SUV and drive them to the recycling depot, an exercise in ecological self-cancellation. Some of my behavior runs roughshod over my intentions, and I muddle forward, doing the best I can.

it was easier in the good old days. For years, I flipped past news stories and magazine articles about the latest atmospheric red flag: hurricanes, fires, cracking ice shelves, gaunt polar bears, and so on. With so much out there already fighting for my attention—work, family, and those precious few diversions from work and family—I knew just enough about global warm-
ing to know that everything about it was hopeless and bleak and insurmountable.

Part of the problem was that I resented the solution. It meant I needed to either inconvenience myself or descend further into consumer debt. Either drive less, the greener-thans said, or buy a more efficient car I couldn’t afford. But with a mortgage and two babies, I was already living close to the edge of both my pay stub and my strategic reserves of life force. Yet the advice was the same: Turn down the thermostat another degree or two and wear a thicker sweater, or retire that old wheezing furnace altogether and invest in a new one. Choose local and organic food, which is tastier and burns less petroleum on its journey to my plate but is twice the price of the bulk packs stacked up at the Big Box store. It’s human nature to take the path of least resistance, and in many cases, that’s precisely what this bleary-eyed, working-stiff dad did.

Meanwhile, the greener-thans tried seducing me with baby steps. Some even packaged the changes up as eco-hedonism, underscoring the simple pleasures of a greener life. As a com-
pulsive recycler, enthusiastic composter, and frequent cyclist, I was already—to crib the language of social marketers—“predisposed.” But somewhere along the path to enlightenment,
I hit a wall. I’d already swapped out my light bulbs with more expensive models that promised to slash my monthly utility bill by 18.4 cents. But that was as far as I could go. I wasn’t pre-
pared to tack a $386 Toyota Prius payment onto my strained monthly budget. I’d rather pump that money into the bottom-less tank of my SUV the one with more room for the stroller
and the groceries.

Why? To answer that, we need to rewind a little further. As a journalist, I am by trade something of a professional skeptic. My career has always been about hunches and the inner voice of curiosity, and I have always tempered the “next big thing” with the cold water of reality. At some point in late 2005, that curiosity led me to do some digging into the sustainability movement, which, by that point, had largely edged classic save-the-owls environmentalism off the radar. Having spent years out on the margins, the greens had crept back onto the pop
culture agenda by refashioning themselves as champions of eco-chic. Suddenly, environmentalism wasn’t about camping out in a tree and eating carob bars or buzzing Japanese whalers in Zodiacs. The new eco-movement was sexy and stylish, all gorgeous bamboo paneling and sleek, wafer-thin photovoltaic panels. It wasn’t about grave problems anymore; it was about easy solutions. Every other new municipal building going up was certified “green,” while Hollywood starlets were giving once-dorky hybrids much-needed va-va-vroom. Hey, Cameron Diaz drives one, and she’s pretty hot, right?

I wanted to peel back eco-chic’s veneer and get at the meaty stuff I suspected lay underneath. I wanted to reverse-engineer the trend. To be honest, a part of me secretly wanted to take it
down a notch or two.

Why? To this jaded skeptic, eco-chic wasn’t about changing the world; it was about changing your furniture. You, too, can be green just like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Julia Roberts,
the new movement promised. Just shun all that nasty plastic—except, that is, the kind in your wallet. Stick a polyurethane-free, latex-stuffed sofa bed over here ($4,500), add some recycled-
glass mosaic tile accents there ($55 a square foot), park a designer Dutch city bicycle ($1,500) in the front hall, and on and on. Though in principle these things were of course all far
kinder to Mother Gaia—polyurethane sofa cushions are damn nasty, and not even Padre would dare dis a bicycle—none of them really required any serious reconsideration of our cycle of
endless production and consumption. If eco-chic had a subtle motto it was this: “Shop different, feel better.” I knew, somewhere deep down, we needed to do more. Much more.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Toyota dealership: in the name of due diligence, I drank the Kool-Aid.

The more I educated myself about what was going on in the blue skies overhead, the more I realized that revisiting my own habits, both at the checkout counter and at home, wasn’t
just the right thing to do—it was a moral imperative. I gradually came to realize that climate change wasn’t some abstract, bummer, out-there issue fighting for my attention like, say, my
neglected retirement savings or a long-planned videotaped home inventory. No, it was about my two preschool-age children and the children they might have someday. Not to get all
terribly earnest, but it stirred inside me the same sort of compulsion to do something that I imagine my British grandparents must have felt as they watched Hitler and his thugs march
across Western Europe.

I resolved to change the things I could and try not to worry too much about the things I couldn’t. Although I was hopelessly jealous of the swish Ford Escape Hybrid that a physician
friend had bought for his family, my wife and I had already sold one of our two carbon-spewing SUVs, so we tried to feel good about that. Problem is, I soon ended up where I am today,
at the start of a year of green renewal, in a kind of eco-neurotic feedback loop. I am by nature a chronic worrywart. It’s my mother’s fault, really (sorry, Mum). From her, I inherited a
nasty nail-biting habit and low-level-anxiety gene, which I have incidentally passed along to my girl Sabrina, the poor thing. It’s more a background anxiousness than a clinical anxiety, nothing that would warrant a regimen of pharmaceuticals—at least not yet. But thanks to my mild personality quirk, I can no longer hide from what I now understand. My newfound eco-
logical literacy suffuses even the mundane routines of my daily life. Some days inside my head, the end of the world just won’t go away.

So, welcome to my one-man recyclables-sorting sideshow set against a backdrop of creeping collective dread. Pour yourself a drink, throw in some ice—hey, the grid is still up; the
freezer’s full of it, right?—and enjoy the ride.

Oprah At Home in the Eco-Shed

The new issue of Oprah at Home magazine devotes three pages to the Eco-Shed, and includes a jaunty 700-word piece by yours truly, adapted from ALMOST GREEN. Here’s a scan of the opener… and speaking of Media Mega-Divas, I’ve guesting on Martha Stewart Radio next week, Sirius XM Radio 112, Tuesday Sept 16 10AM Eastern. Give it a listen!

A Red-State Reco

Padre, my republican father-in-law, is a big Fox News fan. Many of you might know the network, which finds a receptive audience amongst American conservatives. At times its hosts can really go for the jugular. Which is why it was such a pleasant surprise to have a great conversation last week with Spencer Hughes of Fox News Radio. Right off the top of the hour, Hughes called ALMOST GREEN “very humorous, very telling, and very insightful.”

My host kicked off the 20-minute interview by questioning whether climate change is caused by human activity. My response:

“I start my approach from the baseline that this is science, and it’s correct, and that there is just no point in endlessly going around and around about this. We are wasting time, and we are missing an opportunity. And the opportunity is for America to completely reinvent how it does business, how it powers itself, and moving into a completely whole new era, and the opportunity there is tremendous.”

From there the conversation shifted to China and India’s carbon emissions.

You can say ‘We won’t do this if nobody else will,’ and go around and around. Look, this is a nation that was born to lead. And if America says, ‘Listen, we are going to do this,’ well you are going to see the entire rest of the world line up behind you. This is what is so exciting to me, you can create a happier and brighter future starting today, instead of just arguing about, ‘Is it clean coal or dirty coal?’

I was pumped to get out there in front of such a large nationwide audience, and with such a receptive host, who called the book “a good read, no matter where you fall on the global warming debate.” Here’s the MP3. Have a listen.

Spencer Hughes Interview, Fox News Radio, Sept 2, 2008.

Your Logo Goes Here!

File this under ‘sad and funny at the same time.’ Here’s an embossed aluminum pen that my parents recently received in the mail at their house; a promotional-products company sent it to me, hoping to score a new account.

The info on the ballpoint dates from a few years ago when, for the space of a couple months between real-estate transactions, I temporarily moved my family in with my parents who live in a suburb just east of Vancouver. At the time, I was doing some contract gear-writing work for a since-shuttered Conde Nast men’s shopping magazine called CARGO.

I got a good chuckle out of the fact that some far-off privately held customer-leads database thinks that this once-glossy title is not only still in business, but headquartered in Burnaby.

Then it sunk in: How many thousands of these things went out on spec to similarly obsolete firms and addresses? And beyond that, how much logo-crested crap is presently churning its way through the warehouses and shipping channels, into the grateful hands of business people and consumers, who extract whatever utility and joy they can before ultimately handing these items off to the landfills?

Quite a lot, it turns out. According to the Promotional Products Association International, a trade group representing the fine people who make, import, distribute and sell mouse pads, stress balls, magnets, umbrellas, footballs, calendars, plastic coffee mugs, nylon tote bags, watches, ball caps, this is a $19.4 billion industry.

Sigh. If you believe the group’s research, consumer demand keeps the schwag engine running at top speed. Apparently, lots of us still love getting something for “free.” Utlimately all this marketing momentum needs to move into the digital realm, the atoms need to turn into bits. But when’s that going to happen?

How long can this madness continue? Anyone care to weigh in here?

Win a Night in the Eco-Shed

Greystone Books, my Canadian publisher, has organized a fun contest to celebrate the launch of ALMOST GREEN. The prize? A night in the Eco-Shed, the swish little guest house at the center of the plot. For details, visit the contest Web page.

An Edible Bounty

Thank the gorgeous weather, credit the enthusiasm of this community, but the Second Annual Bowfeast Farmer’s Market was a smash success. Here are a few pics — click on any to go to the Flickr stream where you’ll find more. Side note: If you have some images of the event of your own, please tag them with “bowfeast08.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Exclusive: Global Launch Party Details

Holy cats! ALMOST GREEN is now on sale across North America (Amazon.com sales rank as of a minute ago: #485,984,987,098). To celebrate, we’re throwing a launch party Friday August 22 where the whole saga began—spectacular Bowen Island, B.C. Canada. Expect live satellite linkups to and from 34 major metropolitan markets—each of which will be hosting its own "carbon neutral" ALMOST GREEN kickoff parties.

Ok, most of that isn’t true. We will be having a launch event, but there won’t be any dish trucks or velvet ropes. Instead, I am hoping to round up a few bottles of local wine (but not water), maybe a box of chips or two. (Not those yucky cardboard kinds, tho.) If I can get my hands on an LCD projector, there’s even potential behind-the-scenes slide-show fun. At the very least you can listen to me read from the book, and — ahem, no pressure or anything, but maybe even buy it? Hey, just putting that out there.

What do you get from me? How about a stellar door prize. How does a free night in The Eco-Shed sound?

Note: If you’ll be there to shoot and share images, please tag them with "almostgreen."

Details below. Hope to see you there!

ALMOST GREEN GLOBAL NATIONAL LAUNCH PARTY

Friday August 22, 7pm

The Gallery at Artisan Square [MAP]

Bowen Island, B.C
View Larger Map

Brought to you by Phoenix and Greystone Books .

Bowfeast Your Heart Out

There’s a lot of culinary chatter around the house these days, most of it coming from the direction of my wife, Elle — a kind of Tasmanian-Devil whirlwind of organizational energy.

Here, a few choice updates from the land of the carbon-reduced diet:

• Elle is in the process of turning OneDayBowen –the grassroots green group that got its start on our couch, as documented in ALMOST GREEN –into a local non-profit organization. The new group will dedicate itself to on-the-ground solutions to global challenges in areas such as energy and food. Her first project out of the gate is Bowfeast, a single-day celebration of local eating . On Saturday August 16, you’ll find her at the Bowfeast Farmer’s Market in the cove, steps from the ferry dock here on the island. We’ve only got a dozen or so farmers here on this island; with thin soils and plenty of hungry deer, it’s a challenging place to grow food, for sure. But you can meet seven of those farmers in one place, plus microfarmers selling fruit and veg picked that morning from their own food gardens. A good time
• Bowfeast isn’t just the farmer’s market, though. It’s all about encouraging people to eat as locally as possible for the day, and to share the summer harvest with friends. We’ll be hosting a Bowfeast dinner for 17 in the garden at our place that night. Plus, if we host guests in the Eco-Shed that night, they’d be welcome to join us. A special deep-green Bowen evening, indeed
• Elle and I have joined a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture ) venture just getting started here on the island. This project is still very much early days, but has huge potential here.
• Finally, I got my hunting license yesterday. Some of you may have read some of my past work [note: link downloads a .pdf file] on this subject. Executive summary: I’d kill for some local venison. The season starts September 1; I’ve been practicing with my longbow and can still split an apple at 200 yards. Well, almost… Stay tuned.

My Family’s Escape from Plastic

I said goodbye to a few old friends this morning.

I dropped Sabrina and Duncan at day camp and continued on down the road to my community’s recycling depot. There, I walked up to the big green "mixed plastics" bin and tossed in my FridgeSmart stackables, Ziploc Twist n’ Locs and, perhaps most painful of all, my beloved half-cup-size Rubbermaid Servin’ Savers — indispensable snack-stashers that fit perfectly inside my kids’ lunch boxes.

All these little tubs are now gone, casualties of a recent pact between my wife and me to minimize the amount of time our family’s food spends inside plastic containers.

It was a watershed moment for the two of us — the latest stop in a journey that has begun to wander into territory that I once reserved for a class of people I once referred to as "eco-fruitcakes." It has taken us beyond social norms, outside the fuzzy boundaries of mainstream consumer behavior.

Go ahead and laugh

It’s now socially acceptable to forgo plastic bags at the store — even Ikea is calling them "so last year." But my Servin’ Savers purge represents a far more radical act.

I can hear you snickering out there, and I don’t blame you. As far as eco-resolutions go, this one is probably both ridiculous and futile. We know that the lion’s share of our food — yogurt, milk, berries, applesauce, nuts, cooking oil, you name it — is sold to us in plastic packaging. For decades, industry and government scientists have assured us these "food grade" pots, tubs, and sacks are completely benign.

They’re lightweight compared to glass — which means less of a carbon penalty from shipping — and of course they’re recyclable. And as a former Servin’ Savers evangelist, I know the convenience is unbeatable.

But here’s the thing, Mr. Industry and Ms. Government. I’ve been struggling with a few trust issues as of late.

BPA blues

You see, when Sabrina and Duncan were infants, we often fed them pumped breast milk that we warmed up inside polycarbonate Philips Avent plastic bottles — bottles that we recently learned were leaching bisphenol-A, or BPA.

Unless you’ve been living on Baffin Island for the past six months, you know that’s bad news. Earlier this year, Health Canada declared that chemical "toxic" and stated that there is "some concern for neural and behavioral effects in early stages of development" for low levels of exposure.

On its Avent website, Philips today touts a redesigned BPA-free baby bottle that the company assures us it is developing "because we know that needs sometimes change."

Needs do change, yes. So do paradigms. And the thing is, I’m presently undergoing a shift so foreign and clumsy that it feels like puberty all over again. It boils down to this, Philips: I don’t trust you anymore. My consumer confidence has plummeted. In fact, it’s in the basement.

And it isn’t just you; I’m not tying this shift inside my head to this specific named chemical, this particular crisis-management episode. I’m not going to feel reassured when you switch over to a "safer" replacement that is equally convenient for me and profitable for you.

That weird plasticky taste

Oh I know, I know: The third-party research is solid; polypropylene and everything else with a number inside a triangle is perfectly safe. Plastic will remain a staple of our lives for many years to come. Hey, I’m touching it as I write this story.

But I don’t trust that science anymore, and as a result, I’m no longer going to eat off the stuff. I’m no longer able to brush aside the odd taste the water in my squeeze bottle assumes after it’s spent a hot day under my sea kayak’s deck rigging. I’m not going to microwave yesterday’s macaroni in the fresh-saver locking-lid container and then serve it up to my family. I’m not doing any of that anymore. This stuff is petroleum, and I’ve lost my enthusiasm for its endless miracles.

Maybe my Tupperware purge won’t mean a damn in the big scheme of things — petty acts of consumer disobedience don’t often cast so much as a ripple. But radical or not, Elle and I have set down some new ground rules around our place. Eventually we’ll get our hands on one of those Japanese stainless-steel lunch kits, but in the meantime, I’m packing Duncan and Sabrina’s lunch boxes with small glass mason jars and wax paper.

The wax paper is ok, but the jars suck. They’re heavy, and the counsellors at day camp are not very pleased to see my kids dealing with them on their field trip to the beach. After all, glass is a liability. It breaks.

Uncharted territory

I don’t know where this one is going, because the truth is, I don’t know who to trust. I find I’m running confidence problems in my head: I score one point to Canada’s new government for standing up to the Canadian Plastics Industry Association on this one — the lobbying has been intense. But then I dock two from that same agency for not telling me sooner, when I had two screaming babies around the house.

Please don’t paint me as a Luddite who would do away with life-saving medical devices and send us back to the oxen in the fields. It’s just nowhere near that clear-cut. Indeed, there are many scenarios where plastic is the more sustainable choice. I think of my lunch-kit reboot as the start of a personal investigation into my relationship with plastic; we can’t live without this stuff, but I wonder if maybe we can learn to live with less of it, or figure out how to deploy it more thoughtfully.

In the end, we only have our own gut to guide us on this stuff. And laugh if you will, but from here on out, mine is going to contain a few molecules less of Rubbermaid’s latest injection-molded god-knows-what

Originally published on The Tyee, August 1, 2008.

The CBC Session

On July 17, I was a guest on CBC Radio One’s “Sounds Like Canada,” a national program. It was a great interview; host Rick Cluff and I had lots of fun. Give it a listen.

Sounds Like Canada, Streaming MP3 file, [14.7 MB, 16 minutes].